Lights Out
by That Nanda
Summary: AU; 18 year-old Inuyasha finds himself in a waking nightmare.


*Author's Note: I realize that this is a big departure from the stuff I usually write. It's dark, it's AU, and it's very, very short. I don't know if I'm going to go through with this. I guess I'll see what people think and decide from there.

Lights Out

Part 1

Waking Nightmare

Inuyasha had always been claustrophobic, even as a small child. Had his mother been alive, she might have told him that the reason for his violent fear of small, enclosed spaces was due to a traumatic experience he'd had as a toddler. She'd been folding laundry in the basement, and shortly afterward, he'd disappeared. He was a precocious child, so the fact that he might have wandered off was not out of the realm of possibility. There was a frantic search of the house, the yard, the street. Hours passed, and after a call to the police station and a visit to every house in the neighborhood, she decided to retrace her steps. On the third step from the basement landing, she finally heard his muted cries. When she opened the dryer, they both screamed; hers was from relief. His was anger. After that day, two things never happened again. Blaming herself, his mother never turned her back on him for a minute while folding laundry, and Inuyasha never trusted his elder brother again.

What his mother never knew, however, was that his was not a normal case of claustrophobia. Being closed in that tight, dark space had left him with acute fears of darkness and solitude to match. At two and a half, Inuyasha shared the emotional scars of a POW who had been thrown into a Vietnamese tiger pit. When forced into a small, dark place, he lost all control of his rationality, becoming no better than a clawing, frenzied animal. 

What his mother had known was that he could not sleep at night unless she sat with him. Every night, for hours she'd sit by the end of his bed, his room lit up like Macy's at Christmas time. Later, when he was older, a night light seemed to suffice. Inuyasha's was not your typical night light, however. The garden-variety, single-bulb with a cutesy picture of Papa Smurf on it wasn't going to cut it. He had a one-hundred watt blackout emergency light.

By the time he reached young adulthood, he had been weaned off the nightlight. Or rather, had been forcibly weaned the day of his mother's funeral; the day Sesshoumaru had become his guardian. The only reason he was able to survive afterward was the twenty-inch television he had received from Sesshoumaru on his sixteenth birthday. Inuyasha's weakness would not be condoned, or henceforth acknowledged in the household, but Sesshoumaru would not have it said that the whelp wasn't well provided for by his elder brother; at least while he remained a minor. Inuyasha loved that television, though he hated the source of the gift and seldom watched it. That set remained turned on all night, every night. While a normal, active young male in every other aspect of his life - if perhaps, a little moody and ill-mannered - if the power had ever failed in the night, or the set had somehow become disconnected, Inuyasha would have been reduced to the howling two-year-old who had been lured into the dryer by Sesshoumaru's promise of 'a treat.'

As he was now.

Inuyasha was not wondering why his television wasn't on, or why he couldn't move his arms. He wasn't thinking anything. He knew only icy, blind panic. His legs began to twitch as he tried to lift his knees to his chest, but they couldn't be moved more than a few inches in either direction. His mouth opened into a large, screaming grimace, but no sound could be forced from his throat. His eyes were bulging as his tortured lungs screamed for air. He managed to gasp a few shallow breaths, then began to hyperventilate.

It was instinct that saved him. In his struggling, his toes had pushed against the obstruction at his feet, and the cold surface he was lying upon slid forward a fraction of an inch. It wasn't much, but it was enough to let in a sliver of light right above his forehead. He could taste fresh air. Slamming his hands against the flat metal walls that held him in place, he used his fingers to push, opening the crack wider. His progress was torturously slow, but before he completely lost sanity, his arms were free and he was pulling himself out. 

He fell about three feet, hitting the ground with a solid thud. He gulped air like starving man as he pushed himself to his hands and knees. His mind registered a surge of pain coursing through his body, but his head wasn't clear enough yet to do anything but kneel and breathe. The air tasted like medicine, and there was a low, throbbing, hum that managed to be both calming and unsettling at once. 

_Familiar…Florescent lights. But this can't be a hospital._

Inuyasha squinted his eyes as they slowly began to come into focus. He'd been right about the humming; florescent lights. Coming from that narrow, dark hell, the room he now found himself in was mercifully well lit by comparison. Not that there was a great deal to look at. Now that he could see clearly, it did appear that he was in some sort of hospital. There was a metal table at the far end of the room, in fact, the whole of the room appeared to be made of metal; it glistened, even in the dull yellow of the florescent bulbs. It certainly _smelled_ like a hospital, but underneath that smell was one of staleness, of something not quite right. 

His heartbeat was finally beginning to slow and level off, and with the past few minutes fading from his mind like a bad nightmare, Inuyasha turned his head to examine the thing that he had been trapped within. It was a metal drawer. It looked like a file cabinet, only bigger, and with no depth. It even had a yellow paper tag in a little box on its face. The room was full of these drawers. Cautiously, he crawled closer to his former prison, noticing absurdly for the first time as the cold ground touched his aching knees that he completely naked. His eyes were beginning to water from the noxious smell of the room, but he could still clearly make out the fine writing on the little yellow tag. 

"John Doe." 


End file.
